Every organisation delivering the UK’s critical services – whether in energy, transport, health, communications, financial services, or any other critical national infrastructure (CNI) sector – relies on uninterrupted digital operations. Disruption to those operations isn’t simply an IT issue; it’s a business continuity and national resilience issue. What is severe cyber threat? Recent high-profile cyber incidents demonstrate a clear and accelerating trend: highly capable threat actors are increasing both their intent and their ability to target organisations of national economic significance, to cause real-world operational disruption. At the same time, new technologies – like frontier AI – risk increasing the speed, scale and ease of attacks. This is what we mean by severe cyber threat.…